Gays: How do you feel about being called "queer"?

[harwee]

I honestly don't mind it.

 

I get there's a generational gap in terms of the manner its reclaimed. But I think that is the point.

[MadonnasBoyfriend]

i find it offensive and get offended every time i hear it esp straight people saying it casually. I dont remember adopting that word and making it ok

[khalyan]

It means the same as gay, homo, fag, queer idk it's all the same you just have to find the intention behind the word to decide if it's offensive or not.

[Pop Life]

1 hour ago, Obsession said:

Sometimes I call myself "queer". I mostly date and/or am attracted to men, but I am still open and attracted to people of any gender. 

 

Sometimes I call myself pansexual, or bisexual. Sometimes I just call myself gay. I think we put way too much stock in labels but I do think "queer" has a political subtext to it that a lot of other labels don't and sometimes, I purposefully identify as queer because I'm interested in the political discussion. 

This is also something I feel is important that I kind of touched on. There's a saying that goes: "Not 'gay' as in happy. 'Queer' as in **** you."

 

I think the general message there is that the term "queer" is inherently transgressive, even if passively. It refers to something that's different or othered in relation to society at large. There are many gay people who see themselves as cleaving pretty closely to social standards in every way outside of who they love and that's fine, but I believe many of us in the community truly are different from our straight counterparts and I readily embrace that. 

 

 

Edited February 8, 2023 by Pop Life

[FreeXone]

Queer. Gay. LGBT.

 

As long as they aren’t saying fa**ot then who cares. 

[Robert]

I don’t personally like the term and I wish there was another umbrella term. I understand LGBT people reclaiming the word but I grew up hearing it as an insult too many times to feel comfortable with the word. That being said, I understand why others do like it.

[Escape]

Don't mind/care.

[Roman Holiday]

Hate the word Queer. I’d rather be called an *** 

[Relampago.]

I really don’t care and didn’t even realize people still cared about this. If someone called me a queer man, I’d be like yeah. If someone called me a gay man, I’d be like yeah. And I grew up being called queer in a pejorative way too, but there’s a distinct difference between the two for me.

 

That being said, people should feel comfortable saying it if they like and self-identifying as that and no one should try to stop that. Actually, the only time I heard someone be opposed to it was when me, a few other gays and two lesbians all did a little huddle and referred to us as a queer group. One lesbian said she didn’t want us identifying as that because it was a negative word, and we said that was fine, but we wanted to identify as that since it was a mixed group of people. 

 

She then went on to say it was like Black people reclaiming the n word which she felt they shouldn’t do either (this was a white woman btw) and once she said that I was like girl bye  Ever since then I haven’t heard any discourse around this in my life. 

[Daddy]

Idk, I think of Harry Styles and little women with colored hair, wearing cat ear headphones and big glasses when I hear the word queer. 

[John Slayne]

it's an inclusive term for the community, i personally use it to describe myself alongside gay, the terms are not mutually exclusive. 

 

in my experience it's usually the toxic white gays that are so vehemently opposed it because they are invested in maintaining their crumb of privilege they get from being white/male/masc... not saying everyone has to call themselves queer but the way some people in the community oppose it is weird and suspicious.

 

anyway i jokingly call myself a f*g too, so i'm not really offended by 'queer'. you should try reclaiming slurs, it makes life so much easier and actually takes away power from other people to harm you. 

[unino]

i like the word

[Betty White]

I don't use slurs so I would never use it and I find it funny how people it was never used against are "reclaiming" it

[Blade Runner]

???????????

 

We're queer, so... 

[Pendulum]

It's a term I would use as a synonym to LGBTQ+ or to describe an LGBTQ+ person whose exact identity I do not know. However, I would never use the word queer to refer to myself. I would just say I'm a gay man. Queer is inherently a political identity and I'm far removed from American queer politics. 

[Pinoxy]

Personally I wouldn't be offended, I would explain to the person still that Im gay and like that they use the term

[spree]

it's the worst of the worst, even moreso than ******.  I also don't like "inclusive".

[Pheromosa]

I don't think all gay people are queer, I don't I'd use it to describe myself

[Cain]

Queer > gay to me

When I look around me most of my friends identify as queer and the spaces and parties I go to are also more queer than gay

 

I’ve never cared for the ‘male only’ spaces, the pumped circuit scene, the stereotypical gay man parody lifestyle that some have (ie being one strike removed from being a cishet man and acting like it)

 

Also intellectually and politically I align more with a queer mindset which would mean being anti-capitalist and abolitionist

[Thuggin]

I’m torn because on the one hand, watching well-intentioned people struggle to remember and rattle off all the letters in the LGBTQ+ acronym makes me cringe, but “queer” does still leave a bad taste in the mouth for a lot of us millennials and older. Personally, it doesn’t bother me, and I often describe the community as queer as an all-inclusive shortcut over the increasingly long acronym. I would never describe myself as queer though. I would just call myself bi, and I wouldn’t call anyone else queer unless I knew they wanted to be called that.

 

Sometimes I think “LGBT” was fine as it was though - maybe not in hyper academic settings but in casual conversation and political activism. Because now we start adding letters like the “I” and “2” when…have Intersex people or 2-Spirit people even indicated they wanted to be included in the acronym?  How are we supposed to speak for them? And I understand there are sexualities like Pansexual and Asexual that aren’t explicit in that acronym, but….is it really that big of a deal? When we talk about “gay rights” or “gay marriage”, I still understand that’s relevant to me as a bi person.

[Joyride]

don't care

 

actually I prefer queer

[Gaia]

On 2/7/2023 at 4:43 PM, Slate said:

Not a term I'd use to describe myself

 

[terrorblade]

just call me a fxggxt

[iconicyayo]

On 2/8/2023 at 1:52 AM, feelslikeadream said:

That's a very fair question. What I meant more specifically by my comment is that researching queer has helped me understand more fully how the term has been used historically, and this knowledge has made me very comfortable with the word. Based on what I know, I have trouble seeing it as a problematic term. However, I also understand that many people do not know much queer history, which is understandable—it isn't taught in schools much, except in special topics courses like I teach. In other words, knowing its history does not make it apparent to me why people are opposed to it; rather, I think people are opposed to it because they do not know its history.

 

For example, you note that the term was "traditionally... used only as an insult." Another user said, "Alot of gay men over 30 grew up during a time when that word was still used as a slur." Another said, "people in the LGBTQ+ community want to reclaim the word" (emphasis mine). These comments speak to what I see as a mistaken understanding that reclamation of queer is a recent phenomenon, that the term enjoyed decades of use as a slur, but that the community has recently decided to reclaim it. This is very far from true, which brings up a few important points as to why I think queer is an appropriate word to use for the community and why its use is historically important.

 

1. Black Feminism & Queer Reclamation

The entire field of queer studies/theory is rooted in the Black feminist thought that emerged most legibly in the 1960s and '70s. Frustrated with the whiteness of the women's movement (i.e. second wave feminism), queer Black women formed their own groups to advance a politics that accounted for what the Combahee River Collective called "overlapping systems of oppression" (and what today we think of as intersectionality).

 

They also had a lot of issues with the gay liberation movement, most famously framed around the Stonewall uprising (1969). Their issue was that the politics of gay liberation so often focused on white gays; white gay men were in leadership positions most of the time and refused to apply an intersectional framework to their political agenda. Many of the Black feminists in this period thus described themselves as queer specifically because gay carried connotations of cis white men. (Many identified as lesbians too, of course, but that term was actually not as embraced as we might assume now; because the term was often used as a slur by white feminists, many of the queer feminists at the time still preferred the umbrella term queer.)

 

My point here is that the term was "reclaimed" in the 1970s by Black feminists, whose work forms the foundation of modern queer studies. As a contemporary queer scholar, I see it as important to continue thinking capaciously about queerness, and not to limit my sexuality to the simplicity of "gayness."

 

2. Queer Nation & the Radical Potential of Queerness

While queer was being used casually by queer writers and activists in the '70s (the era of gay liberation), it wasn't until the AIDS crisis hit the US that the term really became mainstream not only as an umbrella term for the LGBTQ+ community, but as a reference to radical, anti-assimilationist politics. Queer Nation is one of the most important activist groups in queer history, formed out of ACT UP!, a group that challenge Reagan and the government's inaction on HIV/AIDS. As activists in this period used queer so often, it went beyond its niche use in queer activist circle and became mainstream.

 

 

Groups like Queer Nation didn't use the term solely because it worked as an umbrella term, but because it challenge the status quo in other ways. We can see how queer became a verb in this way: to queer something is to call out and challenge its normativity, to make it more complicated, diverse, and open to change. I personally embrace this use of queer, both in noun and verb, rooted as it is in the queer progressive politics of the late 20th century.

 

3. Most Simply of All: The Convenient Label of Queer Studies/Theory 

Given the mainstreaming and reclamation of queer in the 1970s and '80s, the growing field of queer theory used queer to label its work. Queer of color critique followed at the turn of the 21st century. To do any work in queer & queer of color theory, you have to read and say the word constantly. I understand not everyone here is interested in queer theory, has ties to the academy, etc., but the term is needed to talk about these fields and useful in discussing the politics of non-cishet people, as other terms/phrases are a mouthful  

 

Hopefully I explained this clearly enough, but basically, I see both my own queer identity and the study of queerness via its history, where it has been wielded in various conditions as a statement of nonconformity, even within LGBT subcommunities. I understand that I have a very Americanized lens on the issue, as an American myself; I don't know how queer was used in other countries, so your perspective may certainly be shaped by your being raised in the UK. I also know that in some places, people use the word as a slur, but mama, the term was reclaimed 50 years ago, so those people are just out of touch! I can't let them efface my queerness just because they're living in the past 

thank you for this wonderfully detailed explanation. it certainly seems that the history of the word varies considerably between america and u.k.  so it’s very interesting and eye-opening to hear this side of it 

[GraceRandolph]

Seems like a lot of the people wanting to reclaim the word aren't even in the community.